The use of keys in this game makes it boring, tedious, and frustrating. I can play the game for 10 hours and get only one or two Soul Fire Bastion keys. I have to grind monoliths over and over, when I would much rather be doing the other dungeons. They add variety and have the items I actually want for my build.
And holy cow, how annoying is it the first several times you fight a new boss. They one shot you after grinding for 20 minutes to get to them. Then you need another key, so it’s back to grinding monoliths again. It makes the game boring and this could be solved by just letting people run the special dungeons as much as they like. If you are going to have every boss with some unknown set of one-shot mechanics you have to learn – at least you can try again as much as you like. Grinding to get back to the boss again is punishment enough.
At the very least, offer people a special key based on some achievement such as getting to level 100 or something. Why have all these special dungeons and then make the drop rates so ridiculously low? Why do you have only arena keys in the monoliths for rewards – the arena is probably the worst of the bunch and least rewarding.
Perhaps arena key rewards in monoliths should be updated to dungeon keys.
I would also suggest giving players an option to enter dungeons without keys. This option will not give players any drop rate bonus, boss unique drop and completion rewards, but it will be a good option for practicing.
Or you could give the Dungeon bosses several attempts. I think this would be reasonable given that the devs have previously said that you don’t get multiple portals/attempts for the normal monos because there is no “cost of entry” (poe requires you to pay in the form of consumable maps which may have had more traditional currency spent of them to improve them), while with Dungeons you have to “spend” a limited resource (keys) to access them.
I understand the point of the keys is to provide a cost beyond a player’s time to accessing a dungeon. It allows the rewards at the end to be more lucrative if players can’t run the dungeon constantly.
So I suppose another option would be to move needing the keys to the end of the dungeon rather than the start. In other words, you can access the dungeon and attempt to murder everything to your hearts desire but to access the chamber of rewards at the end, you need the key to open it. That might be a little fairer and make it easier to learn to fight the boss at the end.
You dont lose anything by trying again and again but you only get the reward if you have a key… Could leave the the boss drops free for anyone but require a key to open the treasure room in light arbor, open the eternity cache in Temporal Sanctum and as a tithe to the Soul Gambler to see his wares…
I could get behind an idea like this… quite elegant actually and it negates a lot of the sticking points with dungeons right now…
I think keys are fine. As has been pointed out, some kind of payment is needed to start what should be a very profitable run. And I really don’t like the idea of making it free while lowering rewards, that just makes dungeons too much like monoliths or any other content.
Changing up the arena key rewards is definitely the way to go. I generally end up not bothering with arena keys in monoliths just because they are so uninteresting. But making it “a key” reward to one of the dungeons or the arena would help make those rewards more worth chasing after while also future-proofing it for any other content that will require keys to enter. This also adds more player agency to content rather than just pure luck to even be able to engage with dungeons in the first place.
The dungeon rewards aren’t that profitable. The arena is the worst offender. A total joke honestly. For the amount of time you invest, I could get more items by running monoliths. I get TONS of drops in monoliths. Almost every mob I fight it seems to drop a unique.
I can also get very important class specific items by fighting monolith bosses, but if I happen to need a very specific one a dungeon boss has, then I’m limited by keys.
Many dungeon runs result in nothing because of BS one shot deaths and weird bugs. For instance, I’ve died multiple times to fire lich despite having the appropriate shield up. This is a problem with all bosses, but anyway.
Often you aren’t paying for rewards, you are paying for a chance to learn the boss mechanics, which sometimes takes time. This game loves having tons of one shot abilities that can kill you within seconds of a fight starting. I can’t decide if it’s super lazy or super interesting. Needing several keys just to figure out WTF a boss is doing so you don’t get one-shotted is ridiculous IMO.
The monoliths are BORING after awhile. Locking half the content in the game behind keys that often won’t drop for several hours shouldn’t override concerns about people farming a dungeon. I mean, what are they going to farm, the “three” items a dungeon boss drops? Fire Lich drops that stupid ring 9 times out of 10. It’s not exactly rewarding. The soul gambler gives you mostly junk. Julra is the only one with super OP items. Idealism around making stuff challenging shouldn’t be the only focus is my point. If you are bored, nothing else matters because you will just stop playing.
As my other points mention, this approach just punishes those who have a specific build that needs one of the dungeon items. There are many that don’t.
The idea that the other poster mentioned about needing the keys for rewards themselves would at least be a good compromise. Or increasing the drop rates of some of the other keys would also help.
The whole “key” concept seems to be copied from Grim Dawn, but in Grim Dawn, the dungeon really was the most rewarding part and it was easy to get the keys.
Not sure if the keys need to be dispensed with, but something’s gotta change. The dungeons are very underwhelming. The LP dungeon is (almost) worth it since you can establish a goal, instead of just being pure RNG dropping something good.
Dungeons become boring very quickly . it’s the same boss and the same mechanics. No way i’m going to bore myself to death with them, unless the loot is worth it. I’ve run a few (< 5) of each and i’m already just ignoring them.
The scarcity of keys is real. I’ve been playing quite a lot since the updated and i have received about 20 keys TOTAL and i’m seeing 1/3 fewer arbor keys vs soul bastion. so the key distribution appears to be skewed too.
Meanwhile i’m getting at least 3-5x the number of temporal sanctum keys (that’s probably intentional ?).
I think this is also a side issue that is exacerbating the whole dungeon idea… Ignoring the dungeons and their specific issues/problems around mechanics, rewards etc, the odd variation in scarcity of keys really is noticeable and impacts on perception… E.g. I think most people like Temporal Sanctum out of all the dungeons but the keys for this dungeon drop like candy compared to the others - does this affect how people percieve this particular dungeon - i.e. its easy to get a key for it… Yes, it probably has the most useful reward in creating legendaries but I am sure key availability is important in alleviating frustration…
I agree with Light Arbor keys being so much rarer than others… I have found EXACTLY the same (and that the best place to get light arbor keys is actual from light arbor reward chests but thats a different issue). But what i cannot understand is WHY dungeon keys have different rarity… Based on rewards additionally being locked behind a layer of gold & RNG why cant the dungeon keys simply be of equal rarity?
To be honest, after a good amount of time playing since the dungeons were added I am beginning to think that someone was smoking their socks when they planned out the whole dungeon concept - especially looking at the BIG picture of how they fit in and impact the game & the psychological nuances of the design decisions…
I think they started with the dungeon minutia and worked outwards and this, imho has led to all this very odd integration…
Its like they designed the car seats and then decided to build a car around them…
This is to be expected when you have a small sample size or a low drop rate. If you roll a d6 6 times, will you get 1 of each number? Unlikely. If you roll it a million times, you’ll likely end up with even numbers of each number.
I’m not saying that the Lightless Arbour drops aren’t less frequent than the other ones, just that I’d expect to see a spikier distribution for a rare drop (exacerbated with small sample sizes).
I started a new “keys tab” in my stash when I started playing again after my break from the game, which was about a week ago.
Since then I have in it at the moment 12 Soulfire Bastion keys, 21 Lightless Arbor keys, and 36 Temp sanctum keys, but I’ve sold about 20 temp sanctum keys to vendors as I already had a whole tab’s worth of them and got fed up with collecting them.
That’s a week of playing 200-400 mono’s on 2 different characters and with the bosses having 2+ modifiers on them.
It’s almost a ratio of 4TS’s for every 2LA’s for every 1SB key.
As I’m not actually really running those dungeons due to not enjoying any of them, I will keep this Keys stash thing going, and perhaps not sell any more TS keys so as to keep a record. It definitely looks as though the drop weightings are madly off though, and also lots of other people reporting the same sort of thing. I hate to say it, but in this case I don’t think your “even numbers of each roll” is right.
Also interesting to note is that almost all of the LA & SB keys came from mono bosses, but TS keys were still dropping off regular mobs with the same frequency I remember from before my break. I’ve seen less than 5 of the LA & SB keys drop from normal mobs rather than bosses.
Again, based on roughly a week playing since I returned.
It’s not a particularly big sample size, plus you’re seeing a very different ratio (more LA keys compared to SB) to what buzzybug was seeing (more SB keys comparedto LA), therefore it’s probably not that they LA/SB keys are weighted differently (since it’d be one weighting for everyone, not one for you & one for buzzybug).
Only the devs can say whether the keys are weighted differently.
Sure the small sample size makes everything irrelevant BUT… I dont expect anyone to play a million “rolls” of the dice (i.e. key drop moments) so even if the distribution is mathematically correct, its practically bizzare right now and with everything else going on, its just something else that is making a bite of LE a little less appetising…
Yup, quite possibly.
I think the one thing that shares a consensus is though that the 2 new keys are not dropping anywhere near as often or in the same places as the older key.
As Vapour says above, it’s just another little annoyance in a pile of growing ones. The devs have always paid attention to what goes on in the forums, we can only hope that they are paying attention to the grumbles now, especially the grumbles that are coming from sources (who have been here ages) that usually don’t grumble…
I believe the problem was that they WANTED one patch every 3 months.
As mentionned in a recent dev update post, this rhythm was a kind of stress-test / practice run before the seasons for them.
In March, having worked mostly on multiplayer, general performance and visual improvements (while maybe smoking their socks, I don’t know), they had no new content for the patch. So they quickly added something, a bit randomly, to make it look less empty.
And that’s why there is no integration whatsoever.
Thankfully, based on the same dev update post, they have now abandonned the self-imposed 3 months challenge.
We should get patches when they have something to bring, instead of when the calendar says it’s time. Makes a lot more sense.
Sure… Having been involved in development I have always been impressed with EHG delivery schedules wrt new content and major patches… no doubt they have had to proritise what they can “fit” in with each of these cycles and I am sure that things have been left out to make these timelines…
I have no doubt of this.
Imho, I think that one of the sacrifices of this demanding schedule is most definitely the bigger picture issues that now are now being highlighted - everything mentioned in this thread, plus a lot of others that the most experienced tester/content creators have highlighted recently… to me, a lot of these are getting close to potentially concerning issues with fundamental parts of the games design that need to be corrected sooner rather than later to prevent longer term problems… There are already knock on effects that I think even beginner players are experiencing and again, in my personal opinion, they are potentially more important than multiplayer, performance issues or even adding more content right now.
I really am hoping the next 6 month cycle can give the devs time to consider and address these things before they end up being PoE level thorns in their sides…
Yes.
I don’t care about “schedules”. From other games with rigid schedules, it’s almost always caused more harm than good tbh.
As Vapour also mentioned, I think that at the moment there are a few concerning issues that have crept into the game. It’s natural that some things will be learned upon implementation, and cannot be predicted. We all understand that.
I think that now is a defining point in the evolution of LE though. It could go one of 2 ways.
The emphasis is on new content, and less fixes to grumbles/problems happen (some might say, the PoE approach).
The emphasis is on a solid base, and more fixes happen and less content in the next release.
Personally, I’d be much happier with no new content at all next patch and instead emphasis placed on a corrective phase. Fixing glitches, tweaking QoL, and my own personal wish - completely reworking the Dungeon Boss fights to bring them into line with the MoF boss fights. I’d rather see a rock steady base created and solidified, a blueprint ethos for any new boss fights established, and a firm method established for making mechanics “harder” with levels rather than just “add more dmg” - this is where imho the Mono bosses shine with corruption and the Dungeon bosses fail miserably with Tiers.
